These were family secrets shared after the children fell
asleep, after neighbors turned down the lamps - old stories locked in fear
and shame.

Some of those whispered bits of oral history, it turns
out, are true.

In an 18-month investigation, The Associated Press
documented a pattern in which black Americans were cheated out of their
land or driven from it through intimidation, violence and even
murder.

In some cases, government officials
approved the land takings; in others, they took part in them. The earliest
occurred before the Civil War; others are being litigated today.

Some of the land taken from black families has become a
country club in Virginia, oil fields in Mississippi, a major-league
baseball spring training facility in Florida.

The
United States has a long history of bitter, often violent land disputes,
from claim jumping in the gold fields to range wars in the old West to
broken treaties with American Indians. Poor white landowners, too, were
sometimes treated unfairly, pressured to sell out at rock-bottom prices by
railroads and lumber and mining companies.

The fate of black landowners has been an overlooked part
of this story.

The AP - in an investigation that included interviews with
more than 1,000 people and the examination of tens of thousands of public
records in county courthouses and state and federal archives - documented
107 land takings in 13 Southern and border states.

In those cases alone, 406 black landowners lost more
than 24,000 acres of farm and timber land plus 85 smaller properties,
including stores and city lots. Today, virtually all of this property,
valued at tens of millions of dollars, is owned by whites or by
corporations.

Properties taken from blacks were often small - a
40-acre farm, a general store, a modest house. But the losses were
devastating to families struggling to overcome the legacy of slavery. In
the agrarian South, landownership was the ladder to respect and prosperity
- the means to building economic security and passing wealth on to the
next generation. When black families lost their land, they lost all of
this.

Besides the 107 cases the AP documented, reporters found
evidence of scores of other land takings that could not be fully verified
because of gaps or inconsistencies in the public record. Thousands of
additional reports of land takings from black families remain
uninvestigated.

Two thousand have been collected in recent years by the
Penn Center on St. Helena Island, S.C., an educational institution
established for freed slaves during the Civil War. The Land Loss
Prevention Project, a group of lawyers in Durham, N.C., who represent
blacks in land disputes, said it receives new reports daily. And Heather
Gray of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives in Atlanta said her
organization has ''file cabinets full of complaints.''

AP's findings ''are just the tip of one of the biggest
crimes of this country's history,'' said Ray Winbush, director of Fisk
University's Institute of Race Relations.

Some examples of land takings documented by the AP:

•After midnight on Oct. 4, 1908, 50 hooded white men
surrounded the home of a black farmer in Hickman, Ky., and ordered him
to come out for a whipping. When David Walker refused and shot at them
instead, the mob poured coal oil on his house and set it afire,
according to contemporary newspaper accounts. Pleading for mercy, Walker
ran out the front door, followed by four screaming children and his
wife, carrying a baby in her arms. The mob shot them all, wounding three
children and killing the others. Walker's oldest son never escaped the
burning house. No one was ever charged with the killings, and the
surviving children were deprived of the farm their father died
defending. Land records show that Walker's 2 1/2-acre farm was simply
folded into the property of a white neighbor. The neighbor soon sold it
to another man, whose daughter owns the undeveloped land today.

• In the 1950s and 1960s, a Chevrolet dealer in Holmes
County, Miss., acquired hundreds of acres from black farmers by
foreclosing on small loans for farm equipment and pickup trucks. Norman
Weathersby, then the only dealer in the area, required the farmers to
put up their land as security for the loans, county residents who dealt
with him said. And the equipment he sold them, they said, often broke
down shortly thereafter. Weathersby's friend, William E. Strider, ran
the local Farmers Home Administration - the credit lifeline for many
Southern farmers. Area residents, including Erma Russell, 81, said
Strider, now dead, was often slow in releasing farm operating loans to
blacks. When cash-poor farmers missed payments owed to Weathersby, he
took their land. The AP documented eight cases in which Weathersby
acquired black-owned farms this way. When he died in 1973, he left more
than 700 acres of this land to his family, according to estate papers,
deeds and court records.

• In 1964, the state of Alabama sued Lemon Williams
and Lawrence Hudson, claiming the cousins had no right to two 40-acre
farms their family had worked in Sweet Water, Ala., for nearly a
century. The land, officials contended, belonged to the state. Circuit
Judge Emmett F. Hildreth urged the state to drop its suit, declaring it
would result in ''a severe injustice.'' But when the state refused,
saying it wanted income from timber on the land, the judge ruled against
the family. Today, the land lies empty; the state recently opened some
of it to logging. The state's internal memos and letters on the case are
peppered with references to the family's race.

In the same courthouse where the case was heard, the
AP located deeds and tax records documenting that the family had owned
the land since an ancestor bought the property on Jan. 3, 1874.
Surviving records also show the family paid property taxes on the farms
from the mid-1950s until the land was taken.

The AP interviewed black families that lost land, as
well as lawyers, title searchers, historians, appraisers, genealogists,
surveyors, land activists, and local, state and federal officials.

The AP also talked to current owners of the land, nearly
all of whom acquired the properties years after the land takings occurred.
Most said they knew little about the history of their land. When told
about it, most expressed regret.

Weathersby's son,
John, 62, who now runs the dealership in Indianola, Miss., said he had
little direct knowledge about his father's business affairs. However, he
said he was sure his father never would have sold defective vehicles and
that he always treated people fairly.

Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman examined the state's files on
the Sweet Water case after an inquiry from the AP. He said he found them
''disturbing'' and has asked the state attorney general to review the
matter.

''What I have asked the attorney general to do,'' he
said, ''is look not only at the letter of the law but at what is fair and
right.''

The land takings are part of a larger
picture - a 91-year decline in black landownership in America.

In 1910, black Americans owned more farmland than at any
time before or since - at least 15 million acres. Nearly all of it was in
the South, largely in Mississippi, Alabama and the Carolinas, according to
the U.S. Agricultural Census. Today, blacks own only 1.1 million of the
country's more than 1 billion acres of arable land. They are part owners
of another 1.07 million acres.

The number of white farmers has declined over the last
century, too, as economic trends have concentrated land in fewer, often
corporate, hands. However, black ownership has declined 2 1/2 times faster
than white ownership, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission noted in a 1982
report, the last comprehensive federal study on the trend.

The decline in black landownership had a number of
causes, including the discriminatory lending practices of the Farmers Home
Administration and the migration of blacks from the rural South to
industrial centers in the North and West.

However, the land takings also contributed. In the
decades between Reconstruction and the civil rights struggle, black
families were powerless to prevent them, said Stuart E. Tolnay, a
University of Washington sociologist and co-author of a book on lynchings.
In an era when black Americans could not drink from the same water
fountains as whites and black men were lynched for whistling at white
women, few blacks dared to challenge whites. Those who did could rarely
find lawyers to take their cases or judges who would give them a fair
hearing.

The Rev. Isaac Simmons was
an exception. When his land was taken, he found a lawyer and tried to
fight back.

In 1942, his 141-acre farm in Amite County, Miss., was
sold for nonpayment of taxes, property records show. The farm, for which
his father had paid $302 in 1887, was bought by a white man for $180.

Only partial, tattered tax records for the period exist
today in the county courthouse; but they are enough to show that tax
payments on at least part of the property were current when the land was
taken.

Simmons hired a lawyer in February 1944 and filed suit
to get his land back. On March 26, a group of whites paid Simmons a
visit.

The minister's daughter, Laura Lee Houston, now 74,
recently recalled her terror as she stood with her month-old baby in her
arms and watched the men drag Simmons away. ''I screamed and hollered so
loud,'' she said. ''They came toward me and I ran down in the woods.''

The whites then grabbed Simmons' son, Eldridge, from his
house and drove the two men to a lonely road.

''Two of them kept beating me,'' Eldridge Simmons later
told the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
''They kept telling me that my father and I were 'smart niggers' for going
to see a lawyer.''

Simmons, who has since died, said his captors gave him
10 days to leave town and told his father to start running. Later that
day, the minister's body turned up with three gunshot wounds in the back,
The McComb Enterprise newspaper reported at the time.

Today, the Simmons land - thick with timber and used for
hunting - is privately owned and is assessed at $33,660. (Officials assess
property for tax purposes, and the valuation is usually less than its
market value.)

Over the past 20 years, a handful of black families have
sued to regain their ancestral lands. State courts, however, have
dismissed their cases on grounds that statutes of limitations had
expired.

Holman Stadium in Vero
Beach, Fla., was built on land once owned by the Espy
familyAP/Ron Frehm [16K]

A group of attorneys led by
Harvard University law professor Charles J. Ogletree has been making
inquries recently about land takings. The group has announced its
intention to file a national class-action lawsuit in pursuit of
reparations for slavery and racial discrimination. However, some legal
experts say redress for many land takings may not be possible unless laws
are changed.

As the acres slipped away, so did treasured pieces of
family history - cabins crafted by a grandfather's hand, family graves in
shaded groves.

But ''the home place'' meant more than just that. Many
blacks have found it ''very difficult to transfer wealth from one
generation to the next,'' because they had trouble holding onto land, said
Paula Giddings, a history professor at Duke University.

The Espy family in Vero
Beach, Fla., lost its heritage in 1942, when the U.S. government seized
its land through eminent domain to build an airfield. Government agencies
frequently take land this way for public purposes under rules that require
fair compensation for the owners.

In Vero Beach, however, the Navy appraised the Espys'
147 acres, which included a 30-acre fruit grove, two houses and 40 house
lots, at $8,000, according to court records. The Espys sued, and an
all-white jury awarded them $13,000. That amounted to one-sixth of the
price per acre that the Navy paid white neighbors for similar land with
fewer improvements, records show.

After World War II, the
Navy gave the airfield to the city of Vero Beach. Ignoring the Espys' plea
to buy back their land, the city sold part of it, at $1,500 an acre, to
the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1965 as a spring training facility.

In 1999, the former Navy land, with parts of Dodgertown
and a municipal airport, was assessed at $6.19 million. Sixty percent of
that land once belonged to the Espys. The team sold its property to Indian
River County for $10 million in August, according to Craig Callan, a
Dodgers official.

The true extent of land
takings from black families will never be known because of gaps in
property and tax records in many rural Southern counties. The AP found
crumbling tax records, deed books with pages torn from them, file folders
with documents missing, and records that had been crudely altered.

In Jackson Parish, La., 40 years of moldy, gnawed tax
and mortgage records were piled in a cellar behind a roll of Christmas
lights and a wooden reindeer. In Yazoo County, Miss., volumes of tax and
deed records filled a classroom in an abandoned school, the papers coated
with white dust from a falling ceiling. The AP retrieved dozens of
documents that custodians said were earmarked for shredders or
landfills.

The AP also found that about a third of the county
courthouses in Southern and border states have burned - some more than
once - since the Civil War. Some of the fires were deliberately set.

On the night of Sept. 10, 1932, for example, 15 whites
torched the courthouse in Paulding, Miss., where property records for the
eastern half of Jasper County, then predominantly black, were stored.
Records for the predominantly white western half of the county were safe
in another courthouse miles away.

The door to the Paulding courthouse's safe, which
protected the records, had been locked the night before, the Jasper County
News reported at the time. The next morning, the safe was found open, most
of the records reduced to ashes.

Suddenly, it was unclear who owned a big piece of
eastern Jasper County.

Even before the courthouse fire, landownership in Jasper
County was contentious. According to historical accounts, the Ku Klux
Klan, resentful that blacks were buying and profiting from land, had been
attacking black-owned farms, burning houses, lynching black farmers and
chasing black landowners away.

The Masonite Corp., a wood
products company, was one of the largest landowners in the area. Because
most of the land records had been destroyed, the company went to court in
December 1937 to clear its title. Masonite believed it owned 9,581 acres
and said in court papers that it had been unable to locate anyone with a
rival claim to the land.

A month later, the court ruled the company had clear
title to the land, which has since yielded millions of dollars in natural
gas, timber and oil, according to state records.

From the few property records that remain, the AP was
able to document that at least 204.5 of those acres had been acquired by
Masonite after black owners were driven off by the Klan. At least 850,000
barrels of oil have been pumped from this property, according to state oil
and gas board records and figures from the Petroleum Techno logy Transfer
Council, an industry group.

Today, the land is owned by International Paper Corp.,
which acquired Masonite in 1988. Jenny Boardman, a company spokeswoman,
said International Paper had been unaware of the ''tragic'' history of the
land and was concerned about AP's findings.

''This is probably part of a much larger, public debate
about whether there should be restitution for people who have been harmed
in the past,'' she said. ''And by virtue of the fact that we now own these
lands, we should be part of that discussion.''

Even when Southern courthouses remained standing,
mistrust and fear of white authority long kept blacks away from record
rooms, where documents often were segregated into ''white'' and
''colored.'' Many elderly blacks say they still remember how they were
snubbed by court clerks, spat upon and even struck.

Today, however, fear and shame have given way to pride.
Interest in genealogy among black families is surging, and some black
Americans are unearthing the documents behind those whispered stories.

''People are out there wondering: What ever happened to
Grandma's land?'' said Loretta Carter Hanes, 75, a retired genealogist.
''They knew that their grandparents shed a lot of blood and tears to get
it.''

Bryan
LoganAP/Steve Helber [16K]

Bryan Logan, a
55-year-old sports writer from Washington, D.C., was researching his
heritage when he uncovered a connection to 264 acres of riverfront
property in Richmond, Va.

Today, the land is Willow Oaks, an almost exclusively
white country club with an assessed value of $2.94 million. But in the
1850s, it was a corn-and-wheat plantation worked by the Howlett slaves -
Logan's ancestors.

Their owner, Thomas Howlett, directed in his will that
his 15 slaves be freed, that his plantation be sold and that the slaves
receive the proceeds. When he died in 1856, his white relatives challenged
the will, but two courts upheld it.

Yet the freed slaves never got a penny.

Benjamin Hatcher, the
executor of the estate, simply took over the plantation, court records
show. He cleared the timber and mined the stone, providing granite for the
Navy and War Department buildings in Washington and the capitol in
Richmond, according to records in the National Archives.

When the Civil War ended in 1865, the former slaves
complained to the occupying Union Army, which ordered Virginia courts to
investigate.

Hatcher testified that
he had sold the plantation in 1862 - apparently to his son, Thomas - but
had not given the proceeds to the former slaves. Instead, court papers
show, the proceeds were invested on their behalf in Confederate War Bonds.
There is nothing in the public record to suggest the former slaves wanted
their money used to support the Southern war effort.

Moreover, the bonds were purchased in the former slaves'
names in 1864 - a dubious investment at best in the fourth year of the
war. Within months, Union armies were marching on Atlanta and Richmond,
and the bonds were worthless pieces of paper.

The blacks insisted they were never given even that, but
in 1871, Virginia's highest court ruled that Hatcher was innocent of
wrongdoing and that the former slaves were owed nothing.

The following year, the plantation was broken up and
sold at a public auction. Hatcher's son received the proceeds, county
records show. In the 1930s, a Richmond businessman cobbled the estate back
together; he sold it to Willow Oaks Corp. in 1955 for an unspecified
amount.

''I don't hold anything against Willow Oaks,'' Logan
said. ''But how Virginia's courts acted, how they allowed the land to be
stolen - it goes against everything America stands for.''